Page 50 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Winter of Our Discontent / 39

latter drowning the playwright in impossible platitudes and unbear-
able pretensions.
The closeted murder of Clarence (Alec Baldwin) and cold-blooded
betrayal of Buckingham (Kevin Spacey) have never been more effec-
tively (or chillingly) brought to the screen. The unforgettable set
piece, however, is the wooing and winning of Lady Anne (Winona
Ryder). Olivier handled the sequence as an actor's challenge: Could
he, while appearing impossibly ugly, make us momentarily believe
he might actually ply the vulnerable beauty (Claire Bloom) to his
momentary desire? Pacino's approach is more profound: Now tinged
with 1990s feminism via Ryder's liberated-lady image, Lady Anne is
anything but a frightened, pliable, weak person. Initially, she stands
strong against Pacino's Richard. When this Anne finally succumbs, it
is due to some heretofore unacknowledged dark side in this seem-
ingly nice woman. Anne, once her anger has been unleashed, clearly
sees both the dangerous excitement of succumbing to sex with a
man who murdered her father and husband and the kinky charms of
a grotesque figure whose innate charisma allows him one triumph of
will after another.
Though the sequence was shot without any of the glamorous
backdrops that all but overpower the Ian McKellen version, it
nonetheless works here in a way it did not in that elaborate but non-
emotional version. What Pacino's film obviously lacks in production
values it more than makes up for in sheer inspiration and one actor's
obvious adulation for the Bard.

Variations on a Theme

Like his later, more sophisticated Macbeth, Richard III rates as one of
Shakespeare's great spook shows. No wonder, then, that Universal
studios employed elements from the play for one of their chillers,
after bringing Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, and the
Werewolf of London to the screen. With Tower of London (1939), pro-
ducer-director Rowland V. Lee mounted an effective film that first
carried Gloucester (Basil Rathbone) through the historical happenings
Will recounted in the three parts of Henry VII, so that modern audi-
ences would not become confused by complex political situations.
Maintaining the popular view of Richard as a demon, screenwriter
Robert N. Lee managed (thanks to Rathbone's talent as an actor) to
maintain a modicum of the humanity the Bard had added.